It's no secret the weather this year has been anything but typical for much of the nation. From heat in Texas, to flooding in the Midwest, to a hurricane on the East Coast, Mother Nature seems angry. And she unleashed her greatest fury this spring with killer tornadoes ravaging much of the South.

That means the storm shelter business this year has been anything but typical for Barger and Sons. The family-owned, fifth-generation precast producer in Kingston, Tenn., has manufactured a record 175 precast storm shelters in 2011, compared to a typical 100.

Sales continued as August ended. “This season has run longer than most,” says company vice president Eric Barger. “We're still selling storm shelters, and that's pretty odd. We should have stopped selling these two months ago.” Ironically, it was the producer's own close call that prompted it to enter the storm shelter business. One of the worst tornadoes in Tennessee history struck the tiny town of Mossy Grove in November 2002, only a few miles from Barger and Sons' office.

“We bought half a shelter form in 2001, but we never did anything with it. We never made one.” Barger says. “Then when the tornado came, we got serious about designing the door and getting the engineering done. We sold our first one in 2003, a year to the day of the tornado.”

Thanks to the awful 2011 season, the public is getting serious about tornadoes and how to survive them. “Everyone is experiencing quite a surge right now,” says Ernst Kiesling, executive director of the National Storm Shelter Association (NSSA), based at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where Kiesling also is a professor of civil engineering. He believes most precast producers have experienced increases similar to Barger's.

“It's been a phenomenal season and each time there is an event, there is a surge in interest,” explains Kiesling. “Unfortunately, it subsides rather quickly after the event. But the intensities of tornadoes this year and the death tolls have been unusual and have stimulated unusual interest in residential and community shelters.”

Many manufacturers cannot keep up with demand, with some customers waiting three and four months for shelters after placing orders. That has never happened before, Kiesling says.

There are other materials, especially steel and fiberglass, competing for the shelter business. Precast concrete's big advantage is that those competitors must be installed completely underground. This is an advantage for concrete, because the aboveground version is gaining momentum.

Steel is preferred if a shelter is being installed within an existing structure, such as a garage or basement. Some modular steel shelters come in kits which can be carried in pieces downstairs to a basement.

At 7 feet wide, 7 feet deep, and 104 inches tall, the aboveground version weighs 24,800 pounds and can hold up to 12 people. “All we have to do is set it on the ground,” says Barger. “They require no anchoring. They weigh so much and have such a small footprint, the wind would have to get underneath it to lift it. They're so heavy, even if you put a 250 mph wind on it in one corner, it's not going to budge.”

Aboveground shelters have withstood EF2 tornado winds of 111 to 135 mph. “It will go through an EF5 (winds more than 200 mph) with no problems,” Barger adds.